Wounded Warrior Amputee Softball Team to take softball field against ex-Alabama athletes

Friday

Mar 22, 2013 at 12:01 AM

TUSCALOOSA | Ten years ago today, Sgt. Randall Ruggs was patrolling with his Marines unit, four days into Operation Iraqi Freedom, when his vehicle was ambushed by five rocket-propelled grenades. "Something in the explosion hit both my legs,” Ruggs said. “I lost my left leg. They did a great job to save my right leg. Looking back at everything, I could be legless and it wouldn’t be surprising.”

By Tommy DeasExecutive Sports Editor

TUSCALOOSA | Ten years ago today, Sgt. Randall Ruggs was patrolling with his Marines unit, four days into Operation Iraqi Freedom, when his vehicle was ambushed by five rocket-propelled grenades.“Something in the explosion hit both my legs,” Ruggs said. “I lost my left leg. They did a great job to save my right leg. Looking back at everything, I could be legless and it wouldn’t be surprising.”Ruggs, a Monroe, La., resident who is believed to be the first amputee of the Iraq war, played football, baseball and softball in high school, and on Marine football and baseball teams. In one explosive moment, all that seemed to have been taken away.“All I was thinking was peg leg,” Ruggs said. “I didn’t know anything about the technology end of it. I wasn’t even aware of what the prosthetic world really had.”Over time, Ruggs learned that his days in athletics were not over. Now approaching his 36th birthday, Ruggs will throw out the first pitch Saturday when the Wounded Warrior Amputee Softball Team plays a group of former University of Alabama athletes in a slow-pitch game at Rhoads Stadium.Ruggs is a member of the Wounded Warrior team, which was founded two years ago by David Van Sleet, an Army veteran from Vermont, a career specialist in prosthetics with the Department of Veterans Affairs. The Wounded Warrior team is made up of 15 players, split between veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and between veterans of the Army and Marines, all of whom have had at least one limb amputated.“When I saw what was coming back from the Afghanistan war, I thought I saw some pretty good athletes,” Van Sleet said. “Most of them were all pretty darned good high school and college athletes before they lost their limbs. They didn’t think they were going to live and they didn’t think they were going to walk, so playing a sport was the furthest thing from their minds.“I think this has changed their whole outlook on life. To be honest, this is what they were looking for.”The team will play 80 to 100 games this year.“I see this reaction almost everywhere we go. When this team walks in, most of the people tend to feel sorry for what they’re seeing because of everything that has happened with these young guys,” Van Sleet said. “Then they see them warming up and having fun, and I think that attitude changes a little bit. Then they see them play, and after about the second inning I think they stop seeing them as amputees because they are pretty good.”The Alabama All-Star team will include former UA football players Carson Tinker, Tyrone Prothro and Wesley Britt, former Crimson Tide softball players Jaz Lunceford, Leah White and Cassie Reilly-Boccia and other former Alabama athletes.The game was organized by Kate Harris, the UA softball team’s director of operations. She is the daughter of a retired Army colonel and the sister of an Army major who served two tours in Iraq and another brother who is a lieutenant currently deployed in Afghanistan.“It has a little bit to do with wanting to do my part,” Harris said. “It’s incredibly inspiring. They do it because they want to play and compete and inspire. I want it to be a big deal, a huge event to get everybody out from the community to let them know how much we appreciate them.”Harris got approval from UA coach Patrick Murphy to make the game happen, and found an open date on the Wounded Warrior team’s schedule for Saturday. She scheduled the game to start after Alabama’s 1 p.m. game against rival Auburn, and recruited the team of former UA athletes to play. She also enlisted the Patriot Guard Riders, who will provide a motorcycle escort for the Wounded Warriors to Rhoads Stadium.Ruggs won’t be playing this weekend. He is recovering from an operation on his right knee.“I have so much shrapnel in my leg, when they take an X-ray it looks like a constellation,” he said. “They went in and got some metal out of my knee joint.”Ruggs realizes his playing days will be coming to a close at some point, but still enjoys the game.“The playing is fun,” he said. “The camaraderie with the guys on the team, it’s overwhelming. I was just doing my job over there just like all of us were, because we believe in this country. We’d do it a billion times over. We didn’t go over there for medals or accolades, any of that, we went because that’s what our country needed of us.“Our eyes have seen so many things. Just to stop in these games and look around at where you are now, it puts a good memory in the memory banks to replace one of the bad memories. Some of these guys were on a tougher life, and this team was what showed them they can live life again. You can’t put a price on that for what it has done for the guys on this team, including myself. I get kind of star-struck by it.”